The Suit - A play by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Says Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, Director, The Suit : I recall seeing this play in 1995 at the Tricycle Theatre in London during the ‘London  International Festival of Theatre’ (LIFT). It was first produced by the highly regarded Market Theatre, and originally directed by the late Barney Simon, the theater’s founder and artistic director.  The play left a strange impact on me, and I found my self innumerably referring to it  in various conversation- despite the fact that the play is deeply rooted in the politics of South Africa and the presence of the Suit in the play is a metaphor for  apartheid. In this production I would say outright that the play is apolitical, rather, it is not intentionally political and thus, in appearance at least, lacking in agenda.
When you translate a story  from a different cultural context with a different political history how do you create this transformation, was a question that loomed before me. While reading the story I felt the anger of the characters, their sense of being betrayed by their own natures.
Theatre then becomes a courtroom in which we judge ourselves and our mysteries. When we measure the weight of human living, is the heart heavier than the head? Is the husband   guilty of brutalizing his wife? Is his wife guilty of adultery? Or was he angry, or was she lonely? It is for the theatre to mediate.

The Suit: A Brief Synopsis
This theatrical fable by the South African writer Can Themba deals with a cruel moral dilemma faced by a young married couple, and reveals that how within the ostensibly secure walls of marriage, violence is exercised.
It describes the early morning routine of a married couple in the most meticulous detail. Bunty (Vansh Bharadwaj) is a young, hard-working and devoted husband in love with his young and gorgeous wife, Mina (Ramanjit Kaur). He seems to lead a blissful domestic life - reading the newspaper with his morning tea on the balcony, while his wife busies herself to get his bath, clothes and lunch ready. Bunty’s world is undisturbed until one day when he returns home early and discovers his wife in the arms of another man. This unexpected situation makes the lover scuttle off in such a panic that he leaves his suit behind  Devastated, the husband’s revenge is his insistence that his wife   continue to treat the ‘suit’   as an honored guest. ''I see we had a visitor,'' the husband observes sweetly, disguising menace in his placid, unreadable expressions. The husband’s plan is to wield the suit as a weapon, forcing his wife to seat it at an empty chair at meals, to offer it food and even to take it out for walks. Given a prominent (if eerie) position in their home, the Suit (on a hanger) is served food at every meal, and is even taken on Sunday strolls in the neighborhood. It becomes a constant, tormenting and embarrassing reminder of her infidelity.
Despite the absurd nature of this punishment, it slowly provokes the free-spirited but repressed wife’s mental destruction—a metaphor for the insidious emotional abuse of apartheid that plagued South Africa This is the story of a bitter, and brutal account of the collapse of an apparently happy marriage, of infidelity, alienation and the inability to communicate.
Though, in the original adaptation, the woman dies after being unable to take the mental agony caused due to the entry of the suit left behind by her lover, Neelam Mansingh takes the confrontation to a new level by making the husband order his wife to make love to the suit. It’s a diabolical sentence he imposes on his wife, who in the discovery of her shame becomes as contrite and compliant as a servant in fear of being turned out of a job. Starting off tentatively, mortally afraid of what she has been asked to do; the wife transforms into a woman who knows what she is doing.  Halfway into this task, the husband cries foul, realizing the punishment is not going as per plan and asks her to stop. However, it is too late with the wife proclaiming “it (the suit) is my skin”.
Using a stunning blend of character portraits, parody, dialogues in Punjabi and English, Neelam Mansingh has put this little plot into a familiar Indian middle-class setting which is intimate, expressive, charged and real. She explores the man-woman relationship in all its depths without being judgmental, offering neither explanation for the betrayal by the wife who is discovered in bed with her lover by her husband nor any justification for the subsequent behaviour of the husband.

Cast : 
On Stage
Bunty (Husband) - Vansh Bharadwaj
Mina (Wife) - Ramanjit Kaur
Other man - Hitender Kumar
Director - Neelam Mansingh

About the Director : Neelam Mansingh founded “The Company”, a theatre production house in 1984. She is a graduate from National School of Drama and famous for recreating Western classics for theatre lovers. She has directed plays like ‘To Soothe the Seven Spirits’, ‘An Unposted Love Letter’, ‘Kitchen Katha’, ‘Naga-Mandala’ and Little Eyolf which were equally appealing and popular. Her works has been presented at major festivals all-round the world, including LIFT, Festival d’ Avignon and Festival of Perth. The Singapore arts festival . She has won the prestigious Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2003 and Bhasha Vibhagh Award in 2004.  She has participated in workshops with Deepa Mehta for her film, 'Water’  ‘Heaven on Earth’ and ‘What’s Cooking’. Has been teaching at the Department of Indian Theatre Punjab  University Chandigarh since 1990 and is presently the Chairperson.